Borders in Cyberspace:
Information Policy and the Global Information Infrastructure

Brian Kahin + Charles Nesson (editors)

That the Internet is global is a truism, but it is one that many — and
among them, unfortunately, most legislators — still completely fail
to comprehend. Borders in Cyberspace is a study of some of the legal
and policy issues raised by a "global information infrastructure" (or
GII, though most of the contributors write simply about "cyberspace" or
"the Internet").

The opening chapter argues that cyberspace has clear boundaries
and should therefore constitute a jurisdiction of its own, albeit a
unusual one where genuine competition between alternative rule sets
is possible. The second chapter sets the Internet in the context of
global communication more broadly, stressing the continuities provided
by traditional media organisations. (There's some excellent material in
this chapter, particularly about Africa and Eastern Europe, but there are
also signs of cluelessness: among other things it calls Yahoo a browser
and claims that the .com domain is for transnational corporations!)
The next chapter reinforces the first, arguing that networks should be
recognised as "semi-sovereign entities", capable of regulating themselves.
The other chapters are a statistical analysis of correlations between
democracy and email connectivity (suggesting that the latter is a better
predictor of democracy than other indicators); a look at the consequences
of anonymity and regulatory arbitrage for attempts at censorship of the
Internet; and a survey of the jurisdictional issues which the Internet
creates for existing courts and arbitration systems (this is legally
the most technical of the chapters and the one most reliant on details
of United States law).

Part two deals with particular issues in the context of the GII.
A highly theoretical chapter on digital piracy applies theories of
public goods (from Lösch, Samuelson, and Tiebout) to the Internet,
considered as a marketplace for competition between different intellectual
property regimes. A chapter on "Free Speech and the GII" calls for an
international ius cogens based law to regulate "speech that advocates
the following irrevocably reprehensible behavior...: piracy, slavery,
genocide, apartheid, aggressive warfare, terrorism, and torture".
You don't have to be a "free speech absolutist" like me to wonder if there
might not be some disagreement about what belongs in this list, given
that the English-speaking nations are more concerned about obscenity than
anything else (it is worth noting that one of the authors of this chapter
is German). Other chapters address privacy (advocating cooperative
privacy codes, though a little pessimistic about their likely success),
cryptography (a comparison of the policies of the United States, France,
Russia, China, and Japan), international information policy (with the
sharing of meteorological data as an example), and consumer protection
laws (from an Australian perspective!). One of the few features common
to all these issues is the discordance between the positions of the
United States and those of other countries within the developed world.

There is nothing radically new in Borders in Cyberspace, but it wastes
surprisingly little space rehashing common knowledge or providing basic
background information. One consequence is that it is not entirely
suitable for those without online experience (or at least previous
involvement with network policy issues). It is, nevertheless, the best
introduction to the legal and policy consequences of a global Internet
that I have seen anywhere: it really should be mandatory reading for
anyone involved with developing law or policy for the Internet.